Trump’s Imperialism

This article builds on themes explored in a recent episode of The Right Podcast. You can find links to this episode and all related content at The Right Podcast website.

Trump the "Anti-Empire" Illusion

Donald Trump entered the 2016 presidential race casting himself as a political outsider who would upend decades of bipartisan consensus on war, trade, and foreign policy. He mocked the architects of the Iraq invasion, questioned the value of NATO, and scorned traditional allies. For many including segments of the anti-imperialist left, libertarians, and disillusioned centrists this sounded like a long-overdue reckoning with U.S. imperial overreach. Trump, it seemed, was willing to say what others wouldn’t.

But that perception was always a mirage.

Far from rejecting American empire, Trump offered its most distilled and unapologetic version, not cloaked in democracy or human rights but packaged in dominance, transaction, and spectacle. His foreign policy did not reflect restraint or non-intervention; it reflected empire without euphemism. Under Trump, the rituals of liberal justification, cynically described by Noam Chomsky as the “New Humanism,” were discarded in favor of strongman politics more akin to neo-colonialism than isolationism. Where previous presidents framed U.S. power in terms of moral responsibility, Trump turned it into a business pitch, one that treated allies as clients, enemies as leverage, and entire regions as assets to be monetized.

A Populist Language for Imperial Ends

This essay argues that Donald Trump did not scale back the American empire but instead stripped it of its euphemisms and rebranded it as a raw, transactional, and racially inflected enterprise. By analyzing Trump’s rhetoric, policies, and the ideological frameworks that embrace him from Aleksandr Dugin’s traditionalism to post-left apologism we can see more clearly what his presidency represents: not the end of U.S. empire, but its evolution into a more brutal and unmasked form.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump cast himself as a sharp departure from the foreign policy consensus that had shaped both Republican and Democratic administrations since the end of the Cold War. His message was confrontational, nationalistic, and often inconsistent, but one recurring theme was his rejection of wars like the Iraq invasion, which he condemned as reckless, unnecessary, and “stupid.”

At rallies and in debates, Trump regularly criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Unlike most of his Republican rivals, he was openly critical of George W. Bush’s foreign policy legacy. The defining moment came during a 2016 Republican primary debate in South Carolina, when Trump declared:

“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”

This statement was striking not only because it attacked a former Republican president but because it did so about war, an area where Republicans traditionally embraced military strength and interventionism. Trump flipped the script, framing war-making as a failure of elites and a form of corruption.

Throughout the campaign, Trump argued that the trillions of dollars spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would have been better used at home. He emphasized the need to rebuild domestic infrastructure, support veterans, and create jobs, often repeating the phrase “rebuild our country.” This served as a veiled rejection of both neoliberal globalization and neoconservative interventionism.

Trump also positioned himself in opposition to Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record. While he used harsh rhetoric toward groups like ISIS and state actors such as Iran, he frequently accused Clinton of supporting regime change. He linked her to the disasters in Libya and Syria and warned voters that her approach would trigger “World War III.”

On Syria in particular, Trump’s stance contrasted sharply with that of many on the left. Some supported the democratic uprising that began in 2011, standing in solidarity with protesters who became fighters after the Assad regime’s brutal crackdowns. Others, however, saw the Syrian conflict through a strictly geopolitical lens, interpreting U.S. involvement as yet another expression of imperial ambition. Figures like Noam Chomsky and various Communist organizations fit into this latter camp, framing the conflict in terms of Washington’s agenda rather than local revolutionary dynamics. Chomsky, for instance, shared Trump’s talking points by warning that intervention in Syria could lead to World War III.

Trump’s rhetoric blurred ideological lines. While he never embraced the left’s critique of war as imperialism, he tapped into popular disillusionment with the establishment’s foreign policy, disillusionment that cut across party lines. His message resonated with voters who were weary of endless war, skeptical of elite narratives, and ready to turn inward.

This rhetoric, rooted in paleoconservative and crypto-conservative thought, was unfamiliar to many but repackaged in the accessible language of populism. In the wake of the financial crisis and years of war, many disillusioned with establishment politics began searching for alternative voices. During this period, the lines between right and left blurred. For example, Antiwar.com, a conservative-libertarian site critical of U.S. interventionism, could be mistaken for a leftist outlet by mainstream audiences unfamiliar with its ideological roots. This confusion contributed to a broader convergence of far-right and far-left ideas in certain spaces, especially online, where red-brown syncretism began to take shape.

A good example of this dynamic can be found in the 2020 article series "How COVID and Syria Conspiracy Theories Introduced Fascism to the Left." That series explored how overlapping distrust in mainstream media, government institutions, and international organizations created a media landscape where left-leaning individuals found themselves adjacent to, or even embracing far-right narratives. The confusion wasn’t necessarily ideological at first glance. Many were just looking for answers outside of elite consensus. But in that search, the lines blurred, and some began parroting right-wing talking points while believing they were critiquing empire.

Radical Language, Reactionary Logic

Trump’s campaign rhetoric thrived in that ambiguity. In his major foreign policy address on April 27, 2016, hosted by the Center for the National Interest, a think tank aligned with realist schools of international relations, Trump presented what he called an “America First” vision. He declared:

“We’re getting out of the nation-building business, and instead focusing on creating stability.”

It was a pivot from humanitarian interventionism and democracy promotion to a more transactional, nationalist posture. He promised to restore U.S. strength not through alliances or diplomacy, but through economic self-sufficiency and military deterrence. He also delivered a pointed attack on what he framed as elite ideology:

“We will no longer surrender this country, or its people, to the false song of globalism.”

The phrase “false song of globalism” carries weight far beyond policy. In right-wing discourse, "globalism" often operates as a catch-all term for a host of perceived threats: international institutions like the United Nations or the IMF, liberal immigration policy, multiculturalism, and even financial regulation. These critiques are frequently laced with antisemitic tropes, or with language that borrows from them invoking shadowy “bankers,” “cosmopolitans,” or “coastal elites” orchestrating societal decay or demographic change. In some cases, this merges with white replacement theory, framing immigration and cultural change as a deliberate ploy to erase national identity or whiteness itself. Terms like “cultural Marxism” also feature heavily, reducing complex social and academic movements to a sinister agenda.

In contrast, left-wing critiques of globalization focus on neoliberal capitalism, corporate dominance, and exploitation. The left also criticizes many of the same institutions, but for different reasons. Its arguments are usually based on material conditions and class. Instead of focusing on national identity, the left calls for solidarity across borders, supporting workers’ rights, climate justice, debt forgiveness, and fairer distribution of wealth worldwide. Where the right seeks to protect the nation from the world, the left seeks to transform the world through cooperation beyond national boundaries.

This difference is important, yet it is often flattened in online spaces, where rhetoric circulates disconnected from political history or ideology. Trump’s success wasn’t just in shifting the Overton window on immigration, trade, or NATO it was in occupying a rhetorical space that borrowed from multiple traditions while being accountable to none of them. In doing so, he opened the door for a populist politics that could appear anti-establishment without offering solidarity, and anti-war without supporting liberation.

From “America First” to Empire Rebranded

The slogan “America First” carried historical baggage. It was the name of a well-known isolationist movement in the early 1940s, led by people like Charles Lindbergh, who opposed U.S. involvement in World War II. The group was accused of antisemitism and of sympathizing with fascist governments. Critics quickly pointed out this troubling history.

Still, the slogan resonated not only with Trump’s core supporters but also with some disillusioned Sanders voters after his primary loss. For many, “America First” wasn’t about complete isolation. It was about stepping back from expensive foreign commitments, rejecting global institutions, and prioritizing U.S. interests.

In that sense, it echoed themes from George Washington’s farewell address, where he warned against entangling the young republic in foreign alliances. The MAGA movement, which fused elements of the Tea Party with more fringe right-wing groups, often drew on patriotic imagery and historical references to frame its agenda as both a return to the nation’s original values and rebellious against the current liberal establishment.

The message tapped into a nostalgic vision of returning America to its so-called “glory days,” while blaming current struggles on the effects of neoliberal globalization, particularly policies championed by Democratic President Bill Clinton in the 1990s. This framing challenged the Democratic Party’s traditional base of union members and blue-collar voters, many of whom felt left behind by trade deals, outsourcing, and economic restructuring.

Trump’s populist appeal wasn’t new. Back in 2000, Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura had encouraged Trump to run for president under the Reform Party, a party that had gained ballot access and public funding thanks to Ross Perot’s 1996 campaign. Though the party was falling apart due to internal conflict, it had brought together unlikely figures from conservative Pat Buchanan to progressive Ralph Nader, united mostly by their shared frustration with the two-party system.

As neoliberal globalization eroded many of the 20th-century labor gains once associated with the Democratic Party, some disillusioned voters turned to Trump as a different kind of solution. It was one rooted not in collective action but in the Horatio Alger myth, which promised personal success to those who followed the right path, Trump’s path, toward wealth and power.

Trump did not reject U.S. power but argued it should be used more effectively by cutting bad deals, avoiding costly entanglements, and focusing on domestic renewal. He portrayed globalism as a threat to American sovereignty and prosperity, framing trade agreements and foreign commitments as betrayals by the elite. His approach was not isolationist in the traditional sense but selectively disengaged, emphasizing economic self-interest and strength over cooperation. He also linked government regulation and bureaucracy to national decline, promoting a nostalgic vision of a self-reliant America with himself as the one who could restore it. This anti-globalism was not a rejection of empire but a demand to reassert it more aggressively, replacing moral language with hard bargaining and force.

Trump didn’t oppose war in principle. He called the Iraq invasion a disaster not because it was unjust, but because it was executed poorly and failed to “take the oil.” He openly praised strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un not for diplomacy or stability, but because they were “strong” and “in control.” Trump didn’t want to scale back U.S. power. He wanted it unleashed without apology, without restraint, and without alliances that diluted American leverage.

Which brings us to the present.

The Wrecking Ball and the World Order

But to understand how far Trumpism diverges from traditional foreign policy frameworks, we have to look at who best recognized its disruptive nature and it wasn’t a Western analyst. One of the most unsettling — and strangely accurate — analyses of Donald Trump does not come from Western activists, Democrats, or even a critical historian. It comes from Dugin, the Russian fascist ideologue. In a piece published in early 2025 on the Russian geopolitical site Katehon (which I will not link here), Dugin does not describe Trump as a politician in the conventional sense. He calls Trump a civilizational rupture. The symbolic and structural end of liberal modernity and the opening shot of a metaphysical world war. Not just military conflict, but a spiritual and cultural revolt against everything the liberal world order has claimed to stand for.

This framing is disturbing but not entirely wrong. Dugin sees in Trump a figure who unintentionally fulfills his vision of “multipolar traditionalism.” This is a global order that replaces pluralism with hierarchy, democracy with divine authority, and international law with civilizational destiny. Through his rejection of global institutions, human rights, and Enlightenment reason, Trump fits the model, even if he does not consciously subscribe to it.

For Dugin, Trumpism is not just a political revolt. It represents a deeper metaphysical crisis and what he sees as the West’s spiritual collapse. He interprets this decline through the Hindu concept of Kali Yuga, an age marked by disorder and inverted values. Trump is not a savior in this view, but a symptom. He is valued for his ability to accelerate collapse and clear the way for a new civilizational order. This interpretation echoes the ideas of Julius Evola, the Italian fascist philosopher who remains central to Traditionalist thought. Evola believed modernity marked a fall from sacred hierarchy into materialism and relativism. True authority, he argued, comes from spiritual order, not democratic institutions or legal norms. In this context, Trump serves as a destabilizing force who disrupts the existing world to prepare for a return to hierarchy and tradition.

This deeper current, the yearning for rupture, for a break with the status quo, has been building in American politics for decades. It can be traced back to moments like Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 1990s, Ralph Nader’s third-party runs, or more recently, the popular insurgency behind Bernie Sanders. Across these examples, there has been a consistent hunger for alternatives to a bipartisan consensus shaped by neoliberal economics, endless war, and declining trust in institutions. But the crucial difference is where that energy landed. The left was once the engine of progress, with liberals often supporting reform. Today, many from both camps have become defenders of institutions, sometimes out of necessity, as with civil rights or public health.

Meanwhile, the right, fragmented and angry, became the unexpected vessel for a long-simmering desire to upend the system. Fueled by reactionary populism, it redirected that energy not toward justice or transformation but toward retribution. Trump mocked European leaders to project strength and scorned diplomacy. He scapegoated trans people, undocumented immigrants, and refugees to give his mostly white base clear targets for their anxiety and resentment. He expanded ICE, increased deportation powers, and spoke openly about rounding people up, treating entire communities not as citizens or human beings but as threats to be removed. What he offered was not policy in any traditional sense but vengeance, a form of catharsis for those who felt ignored or displaced.

This is how the MAGA movement shifted from a political brand to something closer to a spiritual war, echoing Dugin’s vision of civilizational conflict. It was no longer just about policies or parties, but about identity, destiny, and the perceived collapse of an old order. QAnon supplied the prophecy. Evangelicals supplied the moral justification. And Trump positioned himself at the center as both hammer and redeemer. The desire for change was real but what the right captured, and liberals failed to mobilize, was the need not just for alternatives, but for narrative power. Trump gave people a story in which they were the righteous, besieged by traitors and globalists, and he was the one willing to punish them. In a time of confusion, he offered certainty. In a time of fear, he offered dominance. The result was not a democratic renewal, but a politics of payback, rebirth and ascension.

Dugin makes it clear: Trump is not a realist or a moderate, nor a restrainer of empire. In Dugin’s view, he is a wrecking ball aimed at the fragile architecture of the post–World War II international order. His value lies not in strategy or ideology, but in his capacity to destroy, to unravel diplomacy, multilateralism, and the global consensus on rights and norms. He is not building a new order but clearing the ground for something else.

For some ridiculous reason, CNN decided to platform Dugin. On air, he stated that “Trumpism is essentially Putinism,” and at a structural level, he’s not wrong. Both ideologies reject liberalism, embrace hierarchy and national power, and seek to replace global systems with spheres of influence rooted in civilizational identity and authoritarian control.

When Realists Got It Wrong, and Fascists Got It Right

The irony is stark. While Dugin and others on the far right see Trump with disturbing clarity, many Western academics continue to frame him in more comfortable terms. Scholars like John Mearsheimer and Richard Sakwa have described Trump as a realist or pragmatist, even a restrainer of empire. They argue that his critiques of NATO, his outreach to Russia, and his skepticism of intervention reflect a necessary correction to American overreach. Mearsheimer has long defended Trump’s position, claiming that “Trump, whether he knows it or not, is doing realism.” Sakwa similarly portrays Trump’s challenge to Western hegemony as a course adjustment for a liberal order in decline. Both have faced criticism for echoing pro-Russian narratives, yet their influence persists.

What’s more striking is how their ideas have seeped into leftist thought. Their frameworks have shaped the thinking of figures like Chomsky, particularly in his analysis of Ukraine. This has created a strange syncretic space, where parts of the left, especially those influenced by Chomsky’s anti-imperialism, find themselves aligned — if unintentionally — with voices like Henry Kissinger or, in some respects, even Donald Trump.

But here’s the critical point: all these thinkers miss what Dugin, of all people, understands.

Trump wasn’t against empire. He was against sharing it.

To dismiss Trump as a bumbling isolationist or a misunderstood realist is to miss the historical moment. The danger is not that Trump might accidentally withdraw the U.S. from its imperial commitments. The danger is that he will remake them in his image cruder, crueler, and unbound by any pretense of shared norms.

Trump didn’t want fewer wars because he valued peace. He wanted to win them faster, more brutally, and entirely on his own terms. His goal wasn’t to pull back from the world, but to extract more from it: oil, land, contracts, submission without the constraints of international law or the complications of multilateral alliances. He admired strongmen not because they were strategic thinkers, but because they ruled absolutely. This meant “winning.”

Trump’s worldview sharpened in 2024, when he suggested the U.S. should seize control of Gaza after Israeli bombardment. According to multiple accounts, Trump suggested that the U.S. should simply “take over” Gaza, expel the Palestinians and transform the area into luxury beachfront property.

That’s not isolationism. That’s settler-colonial thinking. That’s empire, plain and simple.

While some intellectuals portrayed Trump as a rational actor scaling back U.S. overreach, projecting their own theories onto him, Dugin saw something far darker. He recognized not a policy correction but a civilizational shift—a break from the postwar liberal order. Trump’s approach marked a turn away from alliances, norms, and restraint, and toward domination, hierarchy, and force.

Trump’s rejection of globalism was not about stepping back, nor was it anything like left-wing critiques rooted in solidarity and justice. His vision was about taking more with fewer constraints, bypassing accountability, and discarding apology. This is why frameworks like realism, restraint, or isolationism fail to capture his approach. References to democracy, human rights, or global stability gave way to a politics that was blunt, transactional, and openly extractive.

Trump was not ending wars or weakening alliances because of a principled position. He was simply no longer pretending. He said the quiet parts out loud. He turned empire into a set of asset grabs and loyalty tests. American power stopped being policy. It became branding.

Spectacle as Sovereignty

The impact of this shift extended beyond foreign affairs. It resonated with a domestic political culture already shaped by disillusionment and cynicism. Trump’s version of empire did not need moral justification or civic myth. It offered a promise of dominance, profit, and punishment for enemies. Many Americans found this appealing, especially those frustrated by the failures of neoliberal policies. It promised material improvements and provided a sense of revenge.

In this way, Trump’s foreign policy was not a departure from American empire. It was a concentrated version of it. The drone strikes continued. Arms sales continued. Military bases expanded. Support for authoritarian regimes remained in place. What changed was the justification. There were no more lofty ideals. Empire became personal, erratic, and entertaining. It was marketed as strength and patriotism but functioned more like a protection racket with nuclear weapons.

What had long been buried under decades of euphemism reemerged as spectacle. But this spectacle wasn’t a byproduct of Trump’s politics; it was the politics. Trump didn’t challenge the liberal order through ideology or coherent alternatives. He destabilized it through performance. Where Dugin imagines the collapse of liberalism as a necessary precondition for a new civilizational order rooted in tradition, hierarchy, and metaphysical destiny Trump offered no such intellectual project. He offered a show. His appeal operated not through grand theory but through branding, provocation, and narrative control. Policy became theater. Power became presence.

Dugin’s vision is deliberate. He sees liberalism as spiritually exhausted and proposes a structured replacement rooted in civilizational identity. Trump, by contrast, never articulated such a philosophy. Yet his movement has taken on religious and eschatological tones, often without his conscious direction. The language of the New Apostolic Reformation, the spiritual warfare rhetoric of anti-LGBTQ pastors, and the moral crusades against “wokeness” or “gender ideology” have imbued MAGA with a sacred mission, even if its leader traffics more in grievance than gospel. Trump does not speak of metaphysics, but the movement around him invokes spiritual struggle. His rallies often feel like revivals, and his leadership is framed not as political, but as providential.

Still, the guiding force of Trumpism is not cosmology. It is the spectacle. What Dugin presents as civilizational theory, Trump presents as entertainment. This is why Trump’s challenge to liberal norms feels less like a structured revolt and more like saturation. It is more Guy Debord than Dugin, less about transcendence and more about visibility. Every insult, every staged humiliation, every act of cruelty was consumed and shared as spectacle. Trump did not propose a new order. He flooded the existing one with noise. The collapse of liberal modernity, in this context, was not engineered from above but performed from within, live-streamed and algorithmically promoted.

In The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argues that in modern capitalist societies, social life is mediated by images, where representation overtakes reality and politics becomes performance. Power operates not through reasoned debate or ideology but through spectacle, through signs, slogans, and simulations that shape perception and manufacture consent. Trump instinctively thrived in this environment. He did not govern through policy but through imagery: photo ops with generals, staged border visits, choreographed rallies, and chaotic press briefings. Even cruelty became part of the show. Children in cages, protestors tear-gassed for a Bible photo, and state violence framed not by law but by memes, chants, and slogans.

The red MAGA hat became more than a campaign logo. It was a symbol of allegiance, branding his supporters through visual uniformity and tribal recognition. Online, Trump’s worldview was reduced to memes and catchphrases that stripped complexity down to loyalty signals. Policy became hashtags. Conflict became content. Trump replaced deliberation with reaction and accountability with virality. In Debord’s terms, he turned the state into a platform and the citizen into an audience.

This spectacle extended beyond foreign policy and into Trump’s economic messaging, which also relied on performance, nostalgia, and myth. When he says, “We had no income tax… The income tax came in 1913. Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich foreign nations, we should be tariffing and taxing foreign nations to enrich our citizens,” he is not just making a nostalgic economic argument. He is reaching back to a particular moment in American history.

The pre-1913 era he praises was the height of the Gilded Age, a time marked by extreme inequality, unregulated capitalism, and the unchecked power of industrial monopolies. It was also a time when laborers worked long hours for poverty wages, often in dangerous conditions, while a small elite amassed unimaginable wealth. But this era did not go unchallenged. It gave rise to the American labor movement, radical organizing, and the eventual push for a progressive tax system, including the very income tax Trump derides, to redistribute wealth and rein in oligarchic control.

His invocation of this period, framed as a return to greatness, omits the fact that it was also a period of widespread exploitation and social upheaval. For the left and even for center-liberals, this should serve as a reminder. The conditions Trump idealizes are the same ones that once demanded a bold, organized response from the growth of unions to the fight for labor rights, fair taxation, and social protections. If we are returning to that economic model, then we also need to return to the organizing traditions that confronted it. This is not just a historical parallel. It is a warning and an opportunity to revive the kind of movement politics that once redefined the American economy from below.

Make Empire Great Again

This was also the birth of the American empire. Far from being a period of inward focus or restraint, the United States was aggressively expanding its influence beyond its borders. The Spanish-American War in 1898 marked a decisive shift, as the U.S. seized control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, asserting itself as a global imperial power. That same year, Hawaii was annexed after a U.S.-backed coup. In the years that followed, the U.S. crushed a Filipino independence movement in a brutal colonial war, intervened across Latin America under the Roosevelt Corollary, and established economic dominance in China through the Open Door Policy. The construction of the Panama Canal made possible by backing Panama’s secession from Colombia, solidified U.S. control over key global trade routes.

This era, the very one Trump evokes, was not defined by simplicity or isolation. It was a time of oligarchic capitalism, violent expansion, and empire-building at home and abroad. Trump’s rhetoric and proposals reflect a revival of this imperial logic. He suggested the U.S. should take over Greenland, echoing nineteenth-century land acquisition wrapped in business language.

He described Gaza as beachfront property that could be redeveloped after Israeli bombardment, reducing a humanitarian catastrophe to a real estate opportunity. He proposed that Russia should be allowed to keep Ukrainian territory because it had taken losses, and later suggested that the U.S. could profit from Ukraine’s rare earth minerals during reconstruction. Even Canada, a longtime ally, was framed as a potential fifty-first state, reinforcing a view of neighboring countries as assets rather than sovereign partners.

These are not isolated remarks. They reflect a worldview in which land, people, and geopolitics are treated as commodities to be claimed or leveraged. The era Trump idealizes laid the foundation for the United States’ global military and economic reach, but it also provoked resistance from labor movements, anti-colonial uprisings, and progressive reformers. To celebrate that period is not to honor American greatness. It is to celebrate the beginning of American empire and to signal its return.

The Empire Deregulated

Despite all the talk of Trump being an isolationist, and the endless cable news debates about whether he would bring the troops home, what we got was not a retreat from empire. There was no multilateralism, no talk of nation-building, no human rights framing. What remained was raw, unfiltered power.

Under Trump, the United States did not end its wars. It simply changed how they were marketed. Drone strikes continued. Arms sales expanded. Military budgets kept rising. The U.S. withdrew from key international treaties, not to promote peace, but to increase leverage. Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and the INF Treaty with Russia. None of this reflected restraint. It was about dominance, carried out in a way that was impulsive, transactional, and deeply personal.

This is where the real Trump Doctrine comes into focus: imperial extraction presented as brand management. Not "we intervene to promote democracy." Not even "we intervene to fight terrorism." But "we intervene to get paid." That doctrine is a settler-colonial fantasy framed through real estate. It echoed the language of forced removal and redevelopment that has long defined the Trump family's business model. From Fred Trump’s role in segregated housing developments in Queens to Donald Trump’s gentrification projects in Manhattan, the family built its fortune by transforming working-class or marginalized areas into exclusive, high-profit spaces.

When Trump speaks about Gaza as a real estate opportunity, he is not just indulging in grotesque metaphor. He is applying the logic of gentrification to a war zone, imagining a flattened, depopulated landscape as a blank canvas for capital. This is not a departure from his past but an extension of it. The same mentality that turned rent-stabilized housing into luxury towers now treats post-conflict territory as property to be acquired, rebranded, and sold.

What stands out is how consistent this logic was across different arenas. Trump was not trying to limit the reach of empire. He was trying to monetize it, to run it with fewer rules and more personal discretion. His trade policy followed the same playbook. The trade war with China was not about solidarity with workers. It was about economic dominance. His threats to South Korea and Japan were not about peace, they were pressure tactics.

This was reminiscent of a protection racket. "Nice alliance you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it."

So, when people call Trump an isolationist, the real question should be: isolated from what? From treaties? Yes. From international law? Absolutely. But from war, from violence, from imperial ambition? Not at all.

Cynically speaking, what Trump did was strip the American empire of its “New Humanism.” He removed the pretense that U.S. power was guided by universal values or moral responsibility. Some might argue that he sought to dismantle what limited checks and balances that system provided. He made the machinery of empire more visible, more crude, and more transactional. He did not want to end wars; he wanted to deregulate them. He wanted to own them, or at the very least, lease them out on better terms for return on investment.

In that sense, Trump was not the end of U.S. empire. He was its rebranding. He turned it into a private enterprise, no longer managed by institutions or shared ideals, but by one man and his instincts. He replaced the language of global leadership with the language of the deal. And when the deal collapsed, he sanctioned, threatened, or bombed anyway.

Trump’s rhetoric on Ukraine is yet another example. It’s not a call for peace but empire-speak disguised as pragmatism. Trump is exploiting the threat of Russian revanchist imperialism to advance a neo-colonial agenda. He framed U.S. aid to Ukraine as conditional on access to rare earth mineral extraction, using support as leverage for resource control. Ironically, this mirrors the situation under Viktor Yanukovych, when the proposed Russian customs union clashed with the market liberalization and regulatory alignment required for EU ascension. Similarly, the U.S. agreement, focused on resource extraction and corporate access, could impose conditions that contradict or undermine the very reforms Ukraine must adopt to join the EU.

This is not anti-globalism in any liberatory sense. It offers no solidarity with the global South, no structural critique of capitalism, no vision for collective emancipation. It is the rejection of multilateral liberalism in favor of something older: a racialized, extractive, and performative empire, filtered through Trump’s media-driven persona. He presents empire not as burden but as brand.

And yet, dismissing Trump as a buffoon or simply condemning his followers misses the deeper truth. Trump did not emerge from a vacuum. His rise was enabled by decades of neoliberal policy failure: rising inequality, deindustrialization, collapsing public trust, and the erosion of democratic institutions. As the liberal center failed to deliver material stability or moral leadership, it created the very vacuum Trump now fills with bluster, authoritarianism, and nostalgia. Liberal commentators often mistook absurdity for incoherence. But figures like Dugin understood that chaos itself could be a political strategy, not a liability.

Resisting Empire as It Is

What makes this moment especially urgent is not just Trump himself, but the willingness of some to excuse or reinterpret his project through the lens of anti-establishment sentiment. That temptation is not only intellectually hollow, it is dangerous. If anti-imperialism is to mean anything, it must stand against all empires, regardless of who leads them or how they package their ambitions.

Trump’s version of empire is not a break from American power. It is its most concentrated form, stripped of pretense, detached from multilateralism, and driven by dominance, branding, and extraction. Trump’s unpredictability was not a sign of incoherence. It was part of the appeal, an invitation to rupture, framed as authenticity and strength, infused with eschatology and performed as spectacle.

The challenge is not to be caught up in the spectacle. It is not to chase every contradictory decision, every infuriating remark or confounding action. That only keeps critics distracted while the empire consolidates. It also accepts a reactionary premise from the start, where every response becomes retaliation rather than refusal. It absorbs time and energy that could be spent organizing, educating, or building alternatives. It feeds the reactionary machine and helps sustain the very narrative architecture that Trump relies on.

To resist empire as it is, we must first name it. Only by identifying its structure, logic, and appeal can we begin to confront it rather than chasing the hundreds of dead-end stories it creates, discards, and forgets. These narratives are not meant to be resolved. They are meant to exhaust. The task is to see through them, not be consumed by them. That requires clarity, consistency, and solidarity with those already resisting it at the margins—not after the next crisis, but now.